The Club - Meeting 302 - Tears

“People can cry much easier than they can change.”  ― James Baldwin

Hello all.  I hope you had a great week.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couples Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, Domestic Discipline relationships. I hope you all had a good week.

My week involved a very, very sore bottom.  As I related over the last two or three weeks, we hit a rough patch where FLR and obedience were concerned.  We had a talk about it on Saturday after I thought we had reached an understanding on things and, wow, was I ever wrong. When we went to bed that night, I was really in a funk, thinking that after more than a decade of DD, we really might have hit an impasse.  But, the next day I sent a long journal entry trying to work through where my feelings were, what I thought to be her thoughts and feelings, etc.  Without going into details, we seem to have gotten things back on track.  The clearest indication of that was that around 8:00 pm that night she sent me a text saying that I was going to get a spanking as soon as we had the house to ourselves, and she definitely delivered.  It was one of the hardest she has ever given me, and for the first time in a long time, I came very close to begging her to stop.  So, she definitely got her point across.

Thanks for all your participation last week.  We’ve had some really great conversations lately.  When I posted last week’s topic, I thought it was so narrow that it wouldn’t generate much discussion, yet we were once again well over 100 comments, and what a range they covered: marking, caning techniques, cuckolding, spanking in anger, communications between DWC couples, severity, surrender and tears.  Lots and lots to explore in future topics! On the idea of communicating more openly and directly with DWC couples, I do want to be part of a solution for that, though so far I haven’t been able to come up with a good alternative that fosters such exchanges yet preserves confidentiality.  But, maybe I need to stop worrying about the confidentiality issue as much, as there seems to be a broad spectrum of how much people care, and those who do care a lot don't need to participate on any alternative platform.  As for getting together in an actual meeting, I’m not sure my wife is there yet, and some days I'm not either.  But, I have dipped my toes into that pool with one or two people who know about our lifestyle and who I am. So, who knows what the future might hold.

But, for this week, let’s talk about two of those things that came up last week – surrender and tears. Now, K.D. will chastise me for taking on the subject of tears yet again, though looking at the topics over the life of the blog, I really have not had that many devoted to to the topic of crying.  Yet, he's right that it is a subject that is near and dear to my DD heart, and its a subject that has played a major role in my DD motivation and aspirations.  Yet, more than a decade into this, I’ve never once cried from a spanking.  I’ve gotten close a time or two, but it’s still never happened but is still often on my mind.  So, while we have talked about this topic before, it's been over a year and we have a bunch of new contributors.  So, let's talk about it again. As with last week, I’m feeling a little lazy and time pressured, so I will crib liberally from last year’s topic and a couple that we did in previous years.

Back in 2018, when Blogger still had a polling gadget, I ran a poll that encompassed both experience with, and interest in, crying real tears from a real adult spanking.  The results for the disciplined husbands regarding whether they had cried and, if not, whether they wanted to, were as follows:

I have not but want to:                                            46%

I have not and do not want to:                                12%

I have but only a few tears:                                    17%

I have, including crying hard or sobbing:               22%

So, about 40% of those who took the poll claimed to have cried at least a few tears.  Among those who had not done so, 46% wanted to.   So, this seems to be an experience that many men sort of want, maybe even enough to ask for it.

The prospect of crying was probably the most significant driver of the emotional reaction I had when I first discovered domestic discipline by stumbling across the DWC website.  Stories of men being brought to tears over their wives knees transfixed me.  It left me with butterflies in my stomach, though that really understates the reaction.  I couldn't sleep.  I couldn't think of much of anything else for the couple of days between when I first stumbled on the concept and when I brought it to my wife's attention. I found the whole prospect both utterly compelling and utterly repulsive.  It both fascinated and scared the living hell out of me.  The thought of letting go of control so thoroughly that I would sob in front of my wife as a result of a paddling or strapping really shook me to my core in a fundamental way.  It scared me like nothing else really every had or has since, yet I found myself compulsively drawn to it.  And, I truly do think that the prospect of being reduced to tears was probably the #1 thing that made DD such an obsession after I found the DWC site.  It didn't feel like a want, so much as a deep-seated need.

While the prospect of sobbing from a spanking now has haunted my DD fantasies for years, I still have not experienced it, even as a result of spankings that plainly fall into the "severe" range. While it's impossible for me to pinpoint exactly why, I've come to believe there are certain factors that play into why some men get there and some don't:

Severity:  This one is a little counter-intuitive.  A spanking must be severe enough to "get the job done."  But, at least in my case, if it starts out very severe from the start using a really painful instrument like a skinny wooden paddle or a rubber strap, I absolutely will not be brought to tears because, paradoxically, it is just too hard and I can't stop myself from resisting it.  I cannot stop myself from trying to "man up" and just get through each swat.  No matter how much I go into the spanking with the intent of "taking my medicine" and leaving myself open to it in a way that might let me release into tears, I just cannot do it if the pain level is too much at the beginning. When my wife was spanking me earlier this week, her first instrument was a leather paddle with holes that has a way of finding my most sensitive areas.  Had she continued with it for a long time, I think she really might have gotten me to the point of real tears.

Duration: My wife tends to spank very hard, but sometimes so much so that my bottom gets in bad shape quickly and then she decides to terminate the spanking.  I suspect that duration plays at least as big a role as severity in bringing about real tears and that sobbing is more likely to happen when it starts really occurring to him that this spanking is going to go on way past his ability to "take it like a man."

 

Immediacy and remorse:  Oftentimes, I'm being spanked for something that we both agree is something I should be spanked for but, (a) it's something that didn't have any real impact on her or anyone else and, hence, I don't really feel all that guilty about it; or (b) so much time has passed between the offense and the consequences that whatever guilt I once felt has dissipated.

Lecturing/Displayed Anger: Related to the presence or absence of remorse, I suspect that a very strong lecture before the spanking would help soften me up emotionally and leave me more vulnerable and, hence, more likely to cry.  Last week, we talked a little about spanking in anger, and I believe that if my wife would really cut loose with the verbal scolding when she is, in fact, very angry at me it would help break down the “take it like a man” resistance.

Embarrassment/"Toxic" Masculinity: Some men's identities are more bound up with the concept of being "manly" with all that it entails.  Unfortunately, one thing it may entail is a very deep-seated resistance to showing vulnerability and an inability to easily display that vulnerability or weakness.  Those identity traits are actually strengths that can help us get through a lot, accomplish a lot and succeed in out-sized ways. But, like all such traits, they can come at a price when they become excessive or one-dimensional. That price may be a very strong resistance to embarrassment and emotional vulnerability, both of which crying from a spanking would likely entail.

Pain tolerance:  The plain fact is, I have a lead bottom and a weirdly high pain threshold.  I've suffered some fairly significant injuries in the past, but they just didn't hurt me as much as they seem to hurt other people.  So, getting me to a point at which the pain becomes truly unbearable is a daunting prospect. 

Encouragement:  Those of us who have a strong emotional resistance to crying may also fear embarrassment more than others.  In those cases, I think the disciplinary wife probably has a role in facilitating tears not just by lecturing sternly then spanking severely, but also by letting her husband know before and during the spanking that not only is she comfortable with him crying, but she wants him to do so.

ZM weighed in on this several months ago, after he had his first crying experience.  His comments [slightly edited] touch on a lot of these points:

Yesterday, I got to experience a first, in that I was spanked to tears for the first time ever, at least as an adult. This has been a topic of endless (and perhaps morbid?) fascination for me, to say the least, and I really couldn't believe that it happened. The punishment was for several prolonged bouts of bad attitude. My wife has been under huge amounts of stress in recent months due to parental health issues, and as she was administering the punishment, I just felt so incredibly bad when I thought of how unhelpful my attitude has been, and how rather than supporting her I was making things more difficult. This guilt, combined with a delrin cane (which is basically just horrible), and in the diaper position (which makes everything so much worse), finally broke down that barrier that I have never really been able to cross before. [She] had pretty much decided beforehand that tears were going to happen, and she continued until they did. Afterwards she said she would have liked to go a bit longer, but it was hard to see me crying. She decided that next time, she will go until she decides it has been enough and then will add a certain number of additional strokes, probably by rolling two dice (resulting in 2-12 additional) just to make sure she didn't under-punish and to give fate a bit of say in the matter.  I agree that it was mostly driven by guilt, combined with a non-relenting spanking. I don't think she punished harder than usual, but certainly longer, and plus she had said before that the next punishment would certainly result in tears, so I think she set the stage for it and that helped me to get into the proper state of mind. Anyway, the tears took it to a whole new level of "real" feeling for us.”

So, tears are once again this week’s topic.  For the men, have you cried from an adult spanking? If so, was it only a few tears, or did you get to the real sobbing we’ve probably all read about in the spanking stories?  If you haven’t cried yet, do you want to? If so, what do you think holds you back?  For the Wives, have you brought your husband (or other significant other) to tears with a disciplinary spanking?  If so, tell us about it. How did you react it?  If you have not brought him to that point, do you want to? Or, does the idea of that leave you squeamish? 

I hope you all have a great week.